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Dallas Eakins, the coach of the Toronto Marlies, was laughing a little at the level of the discourse in the centre of the hockey universe.

Players get typecast. Analysis is instant. Popular opinion is hard to dispel. So Nazem Kadri has played 51 NHL games at age 21, and a verdict has long been handed down.

“You’re a smart hockey person in Toronto if you can say, ‘Kadri’ and ‘turnover’ in the same sentence,” Eakins said recently in an interview.

Indeed, bar-room scouting reports aren’t detailed dossiers. But even the most encyclopedic bird dogs would acknowledge a certain beauty in brevity. Weaknesses are weaknesses, and certainly Kadri’s predilection for giveaways is one of his. It’s also one of the biggest reasons why the seventh-overall pick in the 2009 draft has spent the majority of his professional career as a minor leaguer.

So while there’s a nuanced discussion to be had about Kadri’s professional development, or lack thereof, turnovers are a good place to start. It was during a Marlies game just over a week ago, after all, that Eakins was benching Kadri for a matching pair of first-period cough-ups that gave the opposing team a couple of odd-man breaks.

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“Naz has his habits,” Eakins said. “He has gotten much better at managing the puck. But he will, once in a while, fall back into his old, ‘Hey, I’m going to turn it over.’ It’s an ongoing learning process.”

This week the Marlies will conclude their regular season with a pair of games in Abbotsford before beginning a playoff run with important implications. Yes, their parent Maple Leafs will clean out their lockers on Monday after a seventh straight post-season miss. But if there’s a shadow of optimism around the entire organization, it’s because recent history suggests one of the best ways to get back into the NHL playoffs is to do well in the AHL version. The most compelling of-the-moment evidence is relatively local. The post-season-bound Ottawa Senators are one of the NHL’s great turnaround stories this season in part because Ottawa’s top farm club won the AHL title a year ago.

This will be uncharted recent territory for the Marlies. The past two seasons, the club has finished out of the playoffs.

“There’s something to be said for players learning to be big fish, or learning to have the pressure on them and to respond under that pressure, versus always playing up an age or up a level and just struggling to survive at that level,” said Dave Poulin, the Leafs’ vice president of hockey operations.

“The best players have learned how to dominate a game. They’ve played at levels where they could dominate games. And that’s why they’re the best.”

Certainly that’s the hope for Kadri — that his ongoing education at the minor-league level will one day translate to big-league success. He has never lacked for confidence.

“I think I can be one of the better players in (the NHL),” he said this week. “And I think if I just keep working hard, just because I’ve been down here for a while doesn’t mean I can’t be a dominant player in the NHL. I have faith in myself, and that’s all I need.”

There are those who’ll tell you Kadri has been hurt by hearing too many high-profile hockey voices sing his praises too loudly. Ron Wilson, the ex-Leafs coach, once forecast Kadri as an NHL “superstar.” And Don Cherry, who has made the case for Kadri’s prompt and perpetual promotion to the NHL on Coach’s Corner, has waxed extensively on the beauty of Kadri’s “magic hands.” Still, one wonders if Cherry, as a minor-league lifer who never scored more than nine goals in an AHL season, is a little too easily impressed by Kadri’s gift for modern-day dangling. Heading into Sunday’s home game against the Hamilton Bulldogs, after all, Kadri had all of 18 goals in 47 AHL games this season — solid stuff, but hardly a harbinger for an impending NHL explosion.

Poulin said, for his part, that there have been times when he has seen Kadri as a third- or fourth-line NHL contributor, a speedy addition to a penalty kill, and times when he has seen him as more than that.

But while the best of his peer group has flourished — all six players taken ahead of him in the 2009 draft, and many taken after him, have become established NHL regulars — Kadri, at times, has languished on the same old treadmill making the same old mistakes.

Speaking of his recent benching, Kadri sounded more obstinate than repentant.

“I probably could have kept sticking to the system and getting pucks deep, but we were down a goal at the time and I’m a creative player,” he said. “I see the ice pretty well. I know that some teams are going to put a couple of guys on me, so that’s why I’m always trying to distribute the puck to open guys. The whole process that goes through my mind is, ‘I want to make a play. I want to set somebody up or take it myself.’ Obviously, it doesn’t happen the way I draw it up in my head all the time. But I can say most of the time, it does.”

Close followers of Kadri’s career know how the story of last weekend’s benching ended; Kadri, after dramatically promising Eakins he would “make it up to the team,” was eventually allowed back onto the ice, where he scored the game’s winning goal.

“He came back to the bench and he looks at me and says, ‘I told you I was going to make it up to the team,’” Eakins said. “That’s the great thing about it. He’s a competitive kid. When he does it, he’s not throwing the finger up to us like, ‘(Forget) you, I’m going to do this my way.’”

Poulin, summing up Kadri in two words, used the phrase “continued growth.” Kadri, like the rest of Leafs Nation, is hoping it translates into a rewriting of popular opinion come autumn.

“Every single year I come in with the same mentality, and that’s to play in the NHL,” Kadri said. “That’s the goal: To be a top-six forward next year in the NHL. I think with my stint up there with the new coaching staff, with Randy (Carlyle), he showed a lot of confidence in me, a lot of faith. . . . I know there’s people that believe in me. Maybe not everyone. . . . Maybe some of the fan base, they’re thinking nowadays a first-rounder should be put in (the NHL) right away, and if he’s not, he’s not going to amount to much. . . . But that’s why I’m not worried about anyone else’s opinion but my own.”

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